There’s a powerful scene in “Bamboozled,” Spike Lee’s most difficult and underappreciated movie, in which the street-actor characters played by Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson, having been recruited into a scheme that involves staging a deliberately outrageous, racist pilot for a TV show, find themselves in the dressing room applying blackface. The camera lingers as the cork burns and the grease paint is prepared, and pulls back to show us the characters as they see themselves in the mirror, watching their natural brown hues turn to a shiny, oily black.

Blackface was both insult and injury. Used by white actors, it offered literal cover for the most offensive caricature; used by black actors, it represented a negation of oneself that was demanded to earn a living as a performer, and worse, the prerequisite of dehumanization in order to represent those portrayed as one’s own community, one’s own self. More than any law or repressive policy, it sent the message that black people were simply not human.

Over the weekend, I was shown a tube of grease paint of a make used back in the blackface heyday. A small, banal object, yet one invested with so much and so troubling a meaning. Well it turns out that just a couple of days earlier, the British daily The Independent ran this front-page image in honor of its “Africa issue” with half of the day’s revenues to help fight AIDS on the continent. The depiction is of Kate Moss, the decidedly non-black British fashion model and alleged onetime cocaine/heroin fiend, not only blackened but Blackened — bigger lips, thicker brows, fleshier cheeks. “NOT A FASHION STATEMENT,” the headline blares, while an inset on the sidebar promises a poster of the image inside.

Here’s a British term: BOLLOCKS! That’s also the view of Sunny from Asians in Media and Pickled Politics, our sister-from-another-mother site from across the pond, who puts it succinctly:

Could they not find a black model to represent Africa?

A particularly typical example of liberal guilt “we-feel-sorry-for-you” racism. You see they would have liked to to put a black model on the front but she just would not have sold as many copies. So they used a druggie.

It would have been better for the Indy to not even bother.

Hannah Pool in The Guardian has more:

You can just imagine the meeting. “Let’s do an Africa issue,” says Well Meaning Executive Number 1. “Great, who shall we get on the cover? Iman? Naomi?” asks WME 2. “Nah … too obvious. I know, how about Kate Moss? Let’s make her look African!” Cue much back-slapping at their own cleverness, followed by, perhaps, a lunch of jollof rice and curried goat to seal the deal. (…)

What exactly is this picture of Moss-as-African-woman supposed to portray? I suppose it is meant to be subversive, but what does it say about race today when a quality newspaper decides that its readers will only relate to Africa through a blacked-up white model rather than a real-life black woman? What does it say about the fight against HIV/Aids if that is the only way to make us care? And, as a black woman (born that way), what does this trick say about me?

Pool describes several other instances of “blacking up” in British entertainment and media today, noting that there’s something of a trend in this direction going on. It seems that the backlash against “political correctness” is such, in the UK at least, that any outrage is acceptable or even desirable, as if basic anti-racism were some kind of tendentious, dogmatic ideology:

Why has it become OK for people to black up? “People feel free to play with this stuff because they are operating in an environment where the criticism of being politically correct allows you to do what you want,” says academic Paul Gilroy. “The threat of being labelled politically correct creates an environment where we are scared to voice our objections.” Given the context, the Kate Moss picture is “empty nihilism,” he says.

Though we’ve long had our own backlash against “PC” here in the United States, the prospect of a prominent white actor or model appearing in actual or virtual blackface is, I’d venture to say, more remote. But other communities — whether ethnic, religious, regional — that have not achieved a certain degree of recognition and respect in the US should see this as a cautionary tale. The urge to appropriate, marginalize, and trivialize, with an amazing level of ignorance and insouciance, is apparently built into the workings of our consumer society. Ah, them crazy whitefolks, what will they come up with next?